Team Lead Engineer - Crypto

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.
Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts.
Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it.
Alpaca is proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.
Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!
We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

As a Senior Engineer, you will be responsible for architecting, implementing, and maintaining the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca Crypto and empower millions of users who are trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

For this role, we are seeking an experienced engineer who is obsessed with delivering defect-free solutions, has proven experience architecting and building at scale, and who is not afraid of challenging conventions or voicing their opinions. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in defining those goals in cooperation with a cross-functional team.

Your Role:

This role is to lead all Crypto related engineering including our spot and derivatives exchanges licensed in the US and Bahamas.

Architect, spec and build the perpetual futures exchange including high-performance matching engine, collateral/liquidation/risk engine, public API, kyc/aml, regulatory reporting, settlement clearing and custody, banking, order management, accounting, analytics and compliance integrations.

Our vision for a regulated, centralized multi-asset exchange is designed with modern custody and risk management measures in mind as we prepare for how regulations will change in a post-FTX world. This is a blank canvas opportunity to design a state-of-the-art crypto exchange with the many synergies arising from our renowned securities brokerage with its unimpeachable track record in safeguarding customer assets. We are uniquely positioned to become the pre-eminent brand in global financial investment infrastructure for both crypto and tradfi combined.

Alpaca is 100% distributed and remote. This role will be reporting directly to the Head of Crypto for the initial phase and then to the CTO once the product is more mature.

Things You Get To Do:

• Design highly scalable, mission-critical crypto spot and derivatives exchange trading millions of dollars from day one
• Implement backend services and web applications
• Maintain good software quality and test coverage
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• Experience building a CLOB exchange, HFT, market-making, high performance matching engines, margin/liquidation engines or other high-throughput & low-latency, regulated, fault-tolerant financial system
• Experience in building crypto
• BSc/MSc or equivalent experience in Computer Science or related field
• *Minimum 4 years of experience of backend software development
• Experience with at least one modern programming language like GoLang, Python, C/C++, NodeJS, Java, etc. Our platform is based in Golang
• SQL or relational database skills
• Hands-on knowledge with Bash, Linux & Docker. Kubernetes experience is a plus
• Excited about what we are building at Alpaca

*The position level and title will vary according to candidate's experience and skills

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):

• Experience with Kubernetes, CKA, CKAD certification
• DevOps mindset is an asset
• Experience with NoSQL
• Experience with CI/CD
• Good understanding of the financial market
• Experience with major cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Knowledge of microservice architectures
• Knowledge of clean code principles

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.

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